It happens every year, my real job gets insanely busy and I suddenly find the calendar knocking on the door of deer season. My pre season scouting finds that my clover fields are burned up and not producing well for me. There’s only one solution: get out there and plant something!
I have a couple of go-to’s for these late season plots, but winter wheat, a brassica mix, and (in addition to this mix), some turnips are always at the top of the list when I am planning a late season food plot.
When I plan this planting out, I usually look for a day that is going to be dry enough for me to get into the field and disturb the surface of the soil enough for these seeds to take hold and germinate. But I also look for some rain coming in the forecast. Not only do you need some rain to help it germinate, it can also run a risk of burning up if the weather suddenly turns hot and dry: trust me, I’ve done this more times than I want to admit. Actually, the video I will link to in this post is a result of such a time. I planted a ridge with some wheat and a brassica mix, but when the predicted rain didn’t come through for me, I lost it all!
How to plant it? While there are many different effective ways to get these small food plots in the ground, a tactic I used recently was to use a drag harrow behind an ATV. In the past I’ve used several methods, from a traditional disc and drag behind a small tractor, to a homemade drag from an old pallet pulled used once while I was in a pinch for time and didn’t want to hitch a disc to a tractor and haul it to the plot.
I typically keep the areas I want to use for food plots broken up as the summer goes along anyway, so the soil typically isn’t too hard to scratch enough to get some easily germinating brassica or wheat seeds into.
For this plot I used a drag harrow behind my ATV and was very impressed. First, I pulled it to the ridge I wanted to work on with the smooth side down, letting a couple bags of corn ride along.
Once I was at the piece of ground I wanted to work up, I simply turned it over so an aggressive side was down. I used this and made several passes over the ground to disturb the soil and break it up. After doing this I broadcast the seed I had by hand. Although I brought a small seed sower with me, the tried and true method of simply broadcasting by hand worked well enough for this and was much simpler than trying to worry about keeping a small hopper full constantly.
I then came back and used the smooth side to cover the seed up, dragging across it until I had some good seed to soil contact. This drag harrow worked very well, and my Honda 350 ATV pulled it incredibly easily.
After the plot is planted, all you need to do is just sit back, pray for rain, and watch it grow!
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